7 Ways to Change Your Onboarding Process to be More Helpful to New Hires

Our friends over at BambooHR did some fantastic research about onboarding and developed an enlightening infographic. The above image is just a small snippet of their findings, to view the whole infographic, click here.

From their findings, it’s obviously wise for companies to have a smooth onboarding process to welcome their new hires and help them get the tools they need to be effective at their jobs. When you skimp on employee onboarding, it can cost you thousands of dollars each year. Many of our clients are prime examples of this, which you can see on our Lessonly Reviews page. Taking the initiative to streamline this process can improve productivity by encouraging new workers to stay and grow with the company.

Here are some quick ideas to help streamline your onboarding process:

1. Get paperwork out of the way

Although they won’t say it, new hires feel more at ease if they can take care of their payroll and insurance information first. When they do, they tend to worry less about mishaps regarding their pay and insurance benefits in the future.

2. Make responsibilities clear

Give new hires a written rundown of what’s expected of them. Providing clear direction will eliminate the potential for confusion and give employees a chance to ask questions and voice their concerns before they start working. If employees feel like they’ve been lied to about their job duties, they’ll probably pack up and leave.

3. Schedule follow-ups

Instead of flinging workers at their desks and leaving them to their own devices, schedule biweekly follow-ups for the first 60 days to see how they’re getting along. As new workers get deeper into their jobs, you may find they need additional training or have questions or concerns about work-related issues.

4. Implement a buddy system

A new job feels less intimidating when workers know they have a peer to help them out when they get stuck. After you introduce the new employees to the veterans in their departments, pair each of them with a person they can lean on when they get confused about their jobs.

5. Communicate company culture

The last thing you want is for any of your new hires to experience humiliation because they are unaware of how things in the organization work. When you are onboarding new workers, give them a copy of the company’s policies and procedures. You should also and go over these rules verbally so newbies are clear about what they should and should not do. In addition to the “rules and tools,” be sure to discuss the more intangible side of culture to bring the warmth of the workplace into the light.

6. Use a checklist

The makers of the infographic above, BambooHR, teamed up with Lessonly to co-create an onboarding checklist for people like you to fill out and customize for your own onboarding process. Check it out here. It’s based on items that BambooHR and Lessonly customers typically use in their onboarding process and is meant to help streamline yours. Enjoy!

7. Automate as much as possible

Finally, for your sake, please automate as much of your onboarding process as possible. This leads to less stress on you, less room for human error and priorities to slip the process out of sync, and exudes a spirit of being intentional. Who doesn’t want all of that? In our opinion, one of the best things to automate is training delivery, follow up, and feedback. If you haven’t done so, feel free to start a 15-day trial of our easy training software here.

Employee onboarding can make or break how new hires view your company. If they have a negative experience, they are likely to run the other way. If you have multiple employees quitting each year, it can cost you thousands in resources and productivity. When you follow the above tips, you can streamline your onboarding process and encourage new employees to stick around and grow with the company.